Or if it was easier, and didn’t require bullshit filler to match algorithm requirements.
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Wait, am I reading this wrong somehow?
Recipes on the website were only visible to the user who imported them
So, it’s a repository of information only accessible to the user who uploaded it, which strips out the bullshit and allows you to read the recipe stripped out of any other crap?
I don’t see what’s wrong with that - the user must’ve “paid their dues” by accessing the recipe site in the first place, to upload it, from then on it’s just as if they’re written down the recipe for their own records, no?
If the recipes uploaded are searchable or viewable by everyone else, yeah, I see the issue.
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Ooooo then they would need to get a brick & mortar job???
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Rob: Thank you for this great commentary on the state of the Metaweb and the so-often short-sighted kooky as hell business ideas. It exemplifies why I love reading your insights, but damn the recipe at the end was the CoolWhip of the top!
I know that everytime I want a quick recipe for my instant pot I have to read/death scroll thru 4 to 6 screens of blah blah blah to get to the meat of the article- how to actually cook it! Sigh.I am huessing a half-decent coder could make a page where you would paste the recipes URL and it would present you with a stripped down version just showing the ingredients->steps section of the page. Hint…hint. 
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But where’s the recipe?
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I use Recipe Filter. It has trouble working on some recipe sites, but for most, it’s a great way to see the actual recipe right away without having to scroll through a novella’s worth of narrative first. If it looks good, then you can go back and read all that, but if you can see the recipe won’t work for you right away, you’ve just saved a lot of time!
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Recipes per se, as in, particular methods for preparing foods, are not copyrightable. I think this falls into the “utility” exception in copyright, which says that practical methods for doing things are not subject to copyright. However, particular presentations of recipes most certainly are copyrightable. If you copy a Joy of Cooking recipe word-for-word onto your blog you’d be liable for copyright infringement. But expressing the same step-by-step method in your own words would be acceptable.
That said, there have definitely been cases where recipe authors have taken legal exception to someone sharing the same method as a published recipe. If this were someone with deep pockets like Nestle, they could make life very uncomfortable for you even if their legal standing is shaky.
[N.B.: IANAL]
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You can very much copyright a recipe. But the copyright holder cant sue for infringement if someone sells a cake based off that recipe.
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I feel like I remember a couple of cases where there was the opposite of a copyrighted recipe, i.e. it was a chainletter version of a recipe. “Susan Smallsley received this recipe for Cursed See’s Candy Fudge and refused to make it and send it to 10 people with this letter attached and what happened the next day? - COVID-19!!!”
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There is a woman claiming to have invented the derby pie who trademarked the name and will come after you if you try to sell anything with that name. However, you can sell the same pie with a different name.
Her claims of “inventing” the pie are dubious to me, a professional baker for 30 years. Just about any combinations of ingredients has been sold commercially at some point.
I have also had to agree that any dish I created working at a particular venue belonged to the venue, and putting it on a menu elsewhere would be grounds for legal action.
If I go to the trouble of developing a recipe to post online, which I hope will generate a bit of income, I consider reading my commentary the price of admission to the recipe. If you want free recipes without comments, check a cookbook out of the local library-which could probably benefit from your patronage. These people aren’t your bitch any more that George RR Martin is.
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As noted by wazroth, you can only copyright the way the recipe is written, not the underlying recipe itself - the list of ingredients and what is needed to prepare it. Copyright is not a patent.
This scraping service made the miscalculation of scraping the recipes as written. An AI that scraped the web for recipes and re-wrote them in its own words should be legally legit (but would probably be sued over anyways, and would probably make some huge mistakes and terrible instructions).
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Most likely to find a way to monetize it as a service. I know I sound cynical saying that but most of these one-purpose websites are just apps as a service scheme which they start out as free then transition to freemium and finally close off the useful features related to the singular purpose. Plus, it’s bad that they scrape this way without any links back to the source.
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I use http://justtherecipe.app
It is effectively the same thing - post in the URL for the recipe you found online, and it will trim it down for you. It’s a little more work than an aggregate site but does the trick!
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If she’s going after people based on the name, then it’s trademark, not copyright. And she might actually have legal footing if she did originate the name and has a reasonable claim to its value in the marketplace. (But once again, IANAL.)
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Also NAL, but your take makes sense, and connects to software copyright (which was the main way of protecting software before software patents were made possible). You couldn’t copyright a process, which is why reverse-engineered clones of software were legal, but you could copyright the written code for executing that process, which is why if a cloned piece of software contained original stolen code, then the creator of the clone would be liable.
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my copy of the joy of cooking is caked in the dried remnants of dickensian ghosts and calls for hard-to-find ingredients like lard, sawdust, and eye of newt.
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So the controversy about copyright and software is in part that copyright is meant to protect creative works, in particular as distinct from utilitarian works. Prima facie, it seems to me like there’s more space for “artistic” creative expression in a medium like a recipe than in computer code, which is more purely functional*. For that reason, the use of copyright to shut down reverse engineering is seen by many copyright experts as an abuse / misuse of the concept, given that there’s a reasonable argument to be made that software is purely functional as opposed to expressive.
(* Please don’t come after me, programmers.)
Cooking is a process, and processes aren’t copyrightable. The only degree to which recipes are copyright is the creativity in expressing how to do the process. Some written recipes aren’t copyrightable at all because they are just the minimum words necessary to convey the process.
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Yeah, I think a list of ingredients followed by the words “muffin method” would not be copyrightable by any argument. What I’m saying is that in recipes as written in cookbooks (or on the web) it’s argued that there’s sufficient room for expression (and actual expression) to make the claim of copyright. The underlying method itself not so much.
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